[5] The magazine's approach and its audience were detailed by Jackie Hatton: The formula has been characterized as "sin-suffer-repent": the heroine violates standards of behavior, suffers as a consequence, learns her lesson and resolves to live in light of it, unembittered by her pain.

I found the Way To Happiness" titled an Eagle Brand Condensed Sweetened Milk ad for a cookbook; the title character confessed to a married friend that a man would never propose to her because he wanted a good girl, who could cook, and received the advertised cookbook as a loan, using it to win him.

[9] During the Great Depression, the emphasis lay on feminine behavior, maternity, marriage, and stoic endurance, often in the face of horrific suffering.

[13] The ambitious career woman still appeared; women, however, who worked from patriotic motives were able to maintain their marriages and bear children.

Advice columns, a regular feature, were written by True Story "authority" "Helen Willman."

The columns glossed over issues of physical abuse toward women by the men that they had chosen as their boyfriends and husbands.

The 1950s also brought about double page color photographs posed in dramatic fashions, which played to the leading titles given the works.

The backs of the magazines were heavily filled with "penny ads" for correspondence courses in nursing, dog grooming, hotel management and holiday card sales.

The program was directed by radio historian Erik Barnouw and broadcast live on NBC beginning in 1935 and continuing through the 1930s.

[19] The UK edition of True Story duplicated the American magazine but also added British material.